Senior fellow Charles Kenny's weekly Foreign Affairs column on using cash transfers to improve security in Afghanistan.
This article was also featured in Foreign Policy's AfPak Channel.
From the Article
In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, both the U.S. Defense Department and Agency for International Development (USAID) are struggling to find ways to use aid resources to promote the goals of development and security. The effort involves a considerable amount of money: If Afghanistan's volatile Helmand province were a country, it alone would have been the fifth-largest recipient of USAID funding in 2008. Meanwhile, aid organizations and NGOs complain that military programs such as the $1 billion Commander's Emergency Response Program build infrastructure that will not be maintained and will provide little long-term development impact. The military, for its part, complains that civilian development efforts are too focused on secure areas at the expense of winning hearts and minds in other places where it would actually make a difference to reduce violence.
More... Both sides are probably at least half-right: Despite many successes in improving Afghan citizens' quality of life, it seems quite likely that aid flows are failing to deliver economic development or security. A recent review of reconstruction in Helmand province by Stuart Gordon of the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) concluded that aid "may have as many negative, unintended effects as positive ones and, at the very least, is not a panacea." Gordon's interviews with people in Helmand suggested a widespread feeling that aid was only entrenching local tribal and criminal elites while doing little to improve the lives of ordinary people. But perhaps there is a way to meet both security and development goals at once. Just giving money to poor people turns out to be a powerful tool to improve lives and foster opportunity. And making that money conditional on security could provide a big incentive for local communities to turn against the Taliban.